Are Engineers Natural Libertarians Or Technocrats? 727
uctpjac writes "This openDemocracy article uses Scott Adams' presidential bid to argue that however much engineers — especially Silicon Valley types — like to think that they're libertarians, they are in fact much more likely to be control-freak technocrats. Quoting: 'Sensibly if uncharismatically, Adams has pledged if elected to delegate most of his decisions to people who know more than him, and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position. His worldview has its limitations – he underestimates the value of ways of thinking other than the engineer's, and it's naïve of him to claim his approach to policy is purely pragmatic and non-ideological.' Is this a fair account? Has the author wrongly read Dilbert, or wrongly interpreted the relationship between the engineering mindset and Adams' representation of it in the cartoon strip?"
We'll be whatever you want... (Score:5, Insightful)
... for a fee.
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a big fan of commenting code. I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting. If your code fails this test, no amount of commenting will improve the situation. Bad code is bad code, no matter how well-commented it is. (True, some code is truly difficult to comprehend and therefore requires comments, usually because what the code is doing is supremely complicated and difficult to comprehend itself. I'm not talking about that kind of code).
Now describing the design overall, that's another matter. But most of the designs I'm called in to fix are so bad that they are undocumentable.
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree there. I will tend toward writing more verbose code for the sake of making it very clear and easy to follow. Unfortunately, I have worked with a lot of people who try to cram as much logic into as little space as possible, with worthless variable names and no comments, so while you can figure out what the code is doing, you have no idea why it's doing it.
For me, that's the real value of comments: they tell you what the developer intended, and from there it's much easier to determine whether it's doing what it should. I've seen plenty of cases where a comment says the code should be doing x, but it's actually doing y. Without any comments, I'm forced to go back to original requirements, and sometimes I don't even have those available (legacy systems suck sometimes.)
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I will tend toward writing more verbose code for the sake of making it very clear and easy to follow.
Turns out, clear and easy-to-follow code also optimizes like gangbusters. So by helping your fellow developers, you are also helping your toolchain give you the best it can offer in terms of high-performing output.
Truly, the only upside to complicated and hard-to-understand code is job security. The kind we don't need. Ever.
For me, that's the real value of comments: they tell you what the developer intended, and from there it's much easier to determine whether it's doing what it should. I've seen plenty of cases where a comment says the code should be doing x, but it's actually doing y. Without any comments, I'm forced to go back to original requirements, and sometimes I don't even have those available (legacy systems suck sometimes.)
I'm not arguing with you on this point. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the developer intended, because the computer can't read the developer's mind--- it can only
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:5, Informative)
The why matters a lot. Good comments should be things like /* I chose this algorithm because I expect the data to meet these criteria. */ When you come to the code ten years after this was written and see that, in fact, the data don't match those criteria at all, you can replace it with a different algorithm. Or you can find that the data still do and so the algorithm makes sense even though its worst-case performance in the general case is terrible.
The sanity check is also useful. If the comments say the code does one thing, yet the code does something else, you've identified a bug. It's a lot better to use a proper specification language for the project than rely on this, but it's also at least an order of magnitude more time consuming...
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I do comment my code. Sorry if I implied otherwise. My problem is with code that's sloppy, hard to follow, and uncommented. People often do this because they think it makes their jobs more secure.
Well, it doesn't. They eventually get laid off, and someone like me is brought in to figure out what the hell they did. Leaving out comments is just a dick thing to do.
Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:4, Insightful)
While I generally understand what you two are trying to say, you don't provide a downside to leaving comments on your ever-so-clearly written code. Probably because there isn't one.
Omitting code comments is plain lazy, period, and there's no excuse not to.
Depends on your definition of 'omit'. At this point in my career, I find that I have finite energy for any given task / bug / refactoring crusade, and it is far better to spend that energy renaming things (for clarity), and preening the whitespace, than on writing comments that nobody reads because everyone knows that code comments are misleadingly outdated.
That said, I think we both agree with the GP post that comments are needed when the reader will need information about why the code does what it does. I presently do a lot of work bugfixing code that was cranked out by our company's low-priced Indian counterparts, and sometimes I would kill for even one sentence of explanation, with which I can proceed to fix up all the variable and function names.
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Sorry, but when did you ever meet an engineer who was taught how to program like that? Most curriculum don't have any explicit programming requirements outside of the syntax you might need for numerical analysis (check ABET if you like, but I don't think it's required yet and probably won't ever be). Engineers are generally great at self teaching just enough to make things work.
What you're talking about is like bringing the communication with computers to an almost scientific level - I think there's a dis
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Sorry, but when did you ever meet an engineer who was taught how to program like that?
Very rarely, but it sometimes happens. The rest of the time, I have to teach it. Which is why I tend to prefer developers who seem teachable, rather than developers with experience. "Experienced" developers are often the hardest to to help unlearn their old, unproductive ways due to their bias against anything different from those old, unproductive ways. Sad, but true.
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I'm not a big fan of commenting code. I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting. If your code fails this test, no amount of commenting will improve the situation. Bad code is bad code, no matter how well-commented it is. (True, some code is truly difficult to comprehend and therefore requires comments, usually because what the code is doing is supremely complicated and difficult to comprehend itself. I'm not talking about that kind of code).
Now describing the design overall, that's another matter. But most of the designs I'm called in to fix are so bad that they are undocumentable.
Then you should not do it for a living. Period.
It does not matter how elegant/clear your code is, eventually, someone else will have to maintain it.
Properly documenting your code ensures that it will have real longevity. Really, the only reason many (most) folks fail to document their code is laziness.
Now, This is often encouraged by the company. They want their code yesterday, not tomorrow. It costs money to place remarks in the source, as well as document the process so that the users can utilize the full
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I agree with you. Comments should be reserved for when something is especially tricky or some non-obvious solution was picked for some other non-obvious reason. Code littered with comments simply explaining what the next line of code does is hard to read and harder to follow. Even worse is when there are required comment templates that make fitting more than 1/10 of a function on the screen impossible to do.
Finally, incorrect comments are worse than pretty much anything else. As soon as trivial comments
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I'm not a big fan of commenting code. I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting.
Your code might be self commenting. The problem is the bug might be at a higher system level, at a higher level that your code.
You need comments for that, unless your system is so simple a noob would figure the whole system out instantly, or your system/framework is magically self commenting at the system design level (I've never seen that!).
You need to comment why your little part of the system fits in right here. Not what your obvious little part of the system does.
True, some code is truly difficult to comprehend and therefore requires comments, usually because what the code is doing is supremely complicated and difficult to comprehend itself. I'm not talking about that kind of code
Example after/before a monstrosity of
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I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting.
Yeah, me too... but you still need comments to describe what block level elements are doing, or some explanation of why you are doing things.
word_to_anagram = "documenting"
def remove_trailing_whitespace(text):
return text.rstrip()
word_list = [ remove_trailing_whitespace(line) for line in file("wordlist.txt") ]
for first_word in word_list:
for second_word in word_list:
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Re:We'll be whatever you want... (Score:4, Funny)
Much of the code I work with is written in MUMPS.
Pity me.
Why does everything have to fit a nice label? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems that most people have a hard time when life isn't left down to 2 choices. No wonder we have such a hard time coming together on a common ground and working out our problems.
Re:Why does everything have to fit a nice label? (Score:5, Interesting)
historically yes, but varies (Score:5, Interesting)
China's government is probably the most engineer-dominated government in the world [slashdot.org], in contrast to the lawyer-dominated Western governments, and it has definite technocratic tendencies. I'd say a lot of western engineers who otherwise dislike the government (e.g. its position on free speech) do admire some of its technocratic infrastructure achievements, like its rapid deployment of high-speed rail.
More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
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More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
That seems like a very complicated answer. How bout "a hacker is an engineer with a really small budget". By occams razor my short and simple answer is much more likely to be correct. All your other postulated behaviors seem to flow from a simple lack of $ or in some cases, time.
A good software engineer can create either (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you understand the basics of politics, learning a new ideology is trivial really.
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Why would you want to? With the underlying structure as defective and damaged as it is, it's like learning a new procedural programming language for a computer with a burned-out main memory.
Besides, I rather like Harold McMillain's claim that ideology is SUPPOSED to be transient.
Pragmatism can be dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pragmatism does not have to be divorced from ethics. In fact, all you have to do is append: "while maintaining human rights and abiding the constitution" to your platform. Personally, I think "do whatever empirically (or theoretically if experimental evidence is absent) works best, as best we can, regularly review the results and add them to our decision making body of evidence, all while not trampling human rights" is a great party platform; much better than blinding shouting "smaller government" or "uni
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Decisions based merely on results, divorced from ethics and morality can bring disastrous results.
That never happens. Circular reasoning or bizarre redefinition of the word "results". The immoral decision was made without taking all results into account, in which case it was a very poor decision
1) If you take all conditions and results into account
2) select the best decision based on step #1
3) step #2 is wrong because you failed in step #1 to account for some pretty obvious conditions.
4) soft science says step #3 is +1 insightful, hard science says you failed miserably back in step #1 not in step #2,
He's actually a comic strip writer... (Score:5, Insightful)
...so taking what he says 100% seriously is probably a mistake. Even if Dilbert does often appear to be a thinly-veiled documentary.
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So, what kind of profession should he have in order for him to be taken seriously? A doctor? An accountant? A street sweeper? A politician?
Forget that, I am missing the big picture here. I, instead, should have started by asking what you do for a living. It's important to know that to be able to tell if anyone should take your comment seriously or not. Because that's what matters the most... ...or, you know, we should simply understand that ad hominem attacks [wikipedia.org] are stupid, and do absolutely nothing to re
Vote for me! (Score:5, Funny)
I further promise to leave voluntarily after a 10 year term and restore the Constitution. I swear.
Pick Two (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pick Two (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, voters do not know what they want, because they do not think things through. Or rather, they know what they want, but they are unwilling to pay for it.
If asked, voters would prefer not paying any taxes at all while being given everything they want.
Most people, no matter where they live and their tax percentage, will say that they pay too much tax. Need to cut back on spending.
Sure. Where? Reducing waste only goes so far, and at some point, you simply can't avoid it. No matter how much you want to, you can't run a pub and expect your glassware or furniture to last forever. Just because you pick a new pub owner, the patrons will still be clumsy and accidents happen.
Cutting one expenditure will almost always result in expenses elsewhere. Cut back on socialized medicine, and you'll pay for it elsewhere, either in an unhealthy workforce (lower taxable income due to sick days or sub-par performance), at the back door, when the people who can't pay for their own treatment take up much more expensive hospital beds - or at the ethics and morals door by simply letting people without money die.
Education is often mentioned. Too expensive. Alright. Cut education and you end up with a less educated workforce. Great short term solution, horrible long term, as that will reduce the number of high paid jobs and thus your taxable income.
Military, surely. Depends on the country. It'd be difficult for Puerto Rico to cut back on their military spending, as it's entirely dependent on the US for that. And cutting back on military spending will result in job losses elsewhere, as you will either move soldiers from the military to the general work populace (aka unemployment), lose jobs at military contractors (as they no longer get as many orders) or both. Plus, if your military is too small, your geopolitical region too unstable, this could result in losing your country and thus your taxable income. Belgium could probably remove its military entirely without military risk - South Korea, not so much.
Roads? Needed for transporting goods. Cut down on road maintenance and you end up with bad conditions not only for goods transport, but also for your workforce to get to and from work. Similar issues with railroads and public transport.
Electrical infrastructure? Critical for the economy.
Internet infrastructure? Critical for the economy, but rarely regulated in the same way.
Water and sanitation? See socialized medicine.
Elder care? Moral and ethical issues with simply letting poor people suffer and die.
One of the reasons politics, everywhere, is so messed up, is that voters have been spoonfed and accepted this notion, that everything can be cooked down to a 20-second sound-bite. It cannot.
Let me give you an example:
This is the Danish budget for 2012: http://www.oes-cs.dk/bevillingslove/ffl12t0.pdf [oes-cs.dk]. It's 562 pages. That's for a country with just under 6 million people, a nominal GDP of about 300 billion dollars and a 2012 budget of about 120 billion dollars.
562 pages. Not that bad. Except that there are three additional documents to add to these 562 pages. First one is 1,024 pages [oes-cs.dk]. Second one is 929 pages [oes-cs.dk]. Third one is a meager 678 pages. That's a total of 3,193 pages.
All to be summed up in a 20-second sound-bite.
So we end up with these ludicrous discussions about minutia. Minutia that very often only covers 1% of 1% of anything. Sure, the numbers may sound big, but in the whole, they're tiny.
All designed to make us think that we and our opinions matter.
If cars were designed the way we run politics, they'd be pretty much guaranteed to explode and kill the occupants the moment they were turned on.
Re:Pick Two (Score:5, Funny)
You know thinking about Politicians in terms of Dogbert explains so much...
What a stupid question. (Score:3)
I prefer "Rational."
Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Its all in the perspective:
1) La de da, I'm building a bridge. My favorite welder on his days off likes to stick tab A into slot B of a member of the same sex. I understand the meaning of an independent variable and file this as such; don't much care. I guess that makes me an engineer-libertarian.
2) La de da, I'm a building a bridge. I sweat over a keyboard for 850 hours of computer simulation to prove that bolt #374904 must be a size 10-24 NC because if some idiot installs a 8-32 NC or smaller the bridge will collapse when loaded with precisely 17 pickup trucks plus one housefly. Cheap businessman wants to install a smaller 8-32 bolt because live and let live, man, my right to tell him what to do ends at the tip of his screwdriver, or some psuedo-libertarian stuff like that. No, F you businessman, I'm going full on technocrat control freak on you and 10-24 NC bolts are getting installed there or its off to the camps with you.
Want to run a country instead of building a bridge? Sounds to me like it don't much matter if tab A gets inserted into slot B no matter what sex A or B is, or what hole they're using, as long as they're both consenting adults blah blah. That's the libertarian answer. The control freak comes out when you say no, you are not F-ing setting up a concentration camp for brown people, because unlike two dudes in a closet, that does destroy a country.
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Funny)
It's a good thing business have never scammed anyone or gone after short term gains instead of long term stability then.
With upstanding businesses like Enron and WorldCom looking out for their reputations, I'm confident we'll never need any sort of regulations either!
When did an open mind become political death? (Score:5, Insightful)
" and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position"
If there's one aspect of the political system that mystifies me, it's this. One of the very definitions of intelligence is the ability to take information and make conclusions. Obviously new information can lead to new conclusions. Yet in politics, even a hint of a politician displaying intelligence by changing his stance after new information and it's the political kiss of death. So instead we get politicians who will stick to their beliefs despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So why are we pushing so hard to support political figures who don't demonstrate intelligence and tossing aside the ones that do?
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Most politicians change their "views" (or at least what they communicate) every other year, they just pretend that they have always believed what they do today.
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The flip flop is a great thing to accuse a politician of, because you get to use the truth, and put in the mind of the voter that the candidate was wrong. Just like a salesperson will get you to agree to some trivialities just to get you to say "Yes", getting the voter to associate being wrong with a specific politician sets up a line of thinking in the voter's mind. "If he was wrong on that,
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Because flip-flopping in practice tends to be motivated by what's popular, not new knowledge.
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" and flip-flop on any issue where new evidence causes him to modify his position"
If there's one aspect of the political system that mystifies me, it's this. One of the very definitions of intelligence is the ability to take information and make conclusions. Obviously new information can lead to new conclusions. Yet in politics, even a hint of a politician displaying intelligence by changing his stance after new information and it's the political kiss of death. So instead we get politicians who will stick to their beliefs despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So why are we pushing so hard to support political figures who don't demonstrate intelligence and tossing aside the ones that do?
Because "flip flopper" has a nice ring to it, and in politics it is always easier to change someone's opinion with doubt than to change someone's mind back, no matter how relevant the evidence is to the contrary. Hell, all you have to do is trip over a sound byte enough to make it *sound* like you are a flip-flopper, and next thing you know you are unelectable...
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Because a flip-flop from a politician usually means "I was lying before". Other times, it means "I'm lying now". Once in a while, it can be genuine. We play the odds.
Also "overwhelming evidence" is not fact. Someone can be innocent of a crime even if there appears to be "overwhelming evidence" of guilt. Often, "overwhelming evidence" means little more than "this is my opinion and there are some people who agree". Sometimes it doesn't even mean that much. Fabricating "overwhelming evidence" is trendin
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there's a lot more to it than engineering (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand I know a lot of engineers who grew up under Soviet communism and are super right-wing. They had a very bad experience with government persecution and they tend to view all government activity through the lens of restricting their rights.
False dichotomy (Score:3)
The article is poorly thought out, as it is based on a false dichotomy between so called "libertarians" and "technocrats". While a libertarian advocates the idea that free will should be the founding rule of a society, which brings us concepts such as the state doing absolutely nothing to affect society, technocracy represents a system of government which is ruled by technical experts. This means that, unless this hypothetical state is a anarchist utopia, the state requires leadership, and if a state requires leadership then that leadership can very well be exerted by technical experts. Hence, you can have a libertarian technocrats, and libertarian states run by a technocratic government.
Dictators (Score:5, Insightful)
We are all dictators inside and that's the exact reason why government power must be limited in a way that satisfies libertarian principles - no one person or a group of people can be trusted when given power over others, that's why individual liberties and private property are paramount and government power must immediately be considered intrinsically evil by the very design and it must be treated as such. Only with the understanding that government is evil by design and will destroy everything it touches, we will come to a balance (if we want to), of keeping the government at its smallest and individual liberties at maximum.
Any time that the balance of power shifts from individual liberties towards growth of government power, it must immediately be suspect, be considered evil and be opposed by all.
Re:Dictators (Score:5, Insightful)
We are all dictators inside and that's the exact reason why government power must be limited in a way that satisfies libertarian principles
I'm endlessly amused by this sentence, as it so beautifully sums up everything that's wrong with libertarians. On the one hand, they understand that people are the problem with government: anyone at the top of a power pyramid will be sorely tempted to abuse that power for personal reasons. Many more will actually abuse that power, even if it is well-intentioned. At the same time, they utterly fail to see that when the government is removed from society, the government power structure will be replaced with any of the other power structures that predate the invention of any formal government: personal connections, money, raw strength, military might, etc. Remove government, and you'll find your life governed by those other power structures.
Just like Karl Marx, they correctly identify today's issue with society. Just like Karl Marx, they utterly fail at incorporating human nature into their solution.
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you are amused because you don't understand the words you are reading and are building a nice flammable straw-man.
they utterly fail to see that when the government is removed from society, the government power structure will be replaced with any of the other power structures
- this is a lie or a misunderstanding, I don't know which is, but I said specifically multiple times in many comments over the years, as is patently obvious [slashdot.org], that there is power vacuum and it will be filled by some form of government.
Government is intrinsically evil because it wants to fill in that void, that power vacuum, which means a force is created to overpower individuals.
That's why we mu
Re:Dictators (Score:5, Insightful)
Your misleading comparisons are just false equivalences.
A weak government is NOT a "non-functional" government. A weak government is a government that cannot go above the law that is set for it to follow.
A strong government does not create a good society and a functioning economy. North Korea and USSR and Cuba have/had "strong" governments. So what?
You are confusing the 2 issues: strong government and a strong nation.
Nation is NOT a government.
Government is NOT a nation.
Strong nation is a nation of laws, nation that protects individual liberties, maximizes individual freedoms and does so without stealing the power from people to give to a small minority of politicians/dictators/power brokers.
Strong nation is a nation that allows free people to make choices with regard to their economics, money, food, sex, marriage, drugs, whatever.
Strong nation is not a nation that uses huge military to bully the world.
Strong government can bully the world by subjugating the individual liberties and freedoms of its people. It also can put people into concentration camps. It can start wars without asking the people either to pay for them or whether the people even want to start the wars.
Somalia today is a product of a long history of difficult situations, including a communist government that was eventually disposed of. The government was disposed of because of how 'strong' it was with its people.
USSR eventually fell apart and North Korea will eventually too, because 'strong' governments make for weak nations as 'strong' government destroys individual liberties and eventually people stop being scared of their 'strong' government, especially when the strength of government obliterates the economy so bad, that people go hungry.
Strong government is not a synonym with a 'good' system.
Not sure I'd want an engineer/politician (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm assuming that the implication is that engineers can solve our problems with process. Lots of social problems might seem like the solutions can be obviously derived with logic, but we're human beings and we do a lot of things that aren't driven by logic. Having children isn't logical; it's expensive, a time drain, and ultimately a financial loss. Practically any form of entertainment we engage in isn't logical (besides intercourse), since we're probably wasting time and resources best spent elsewhere. Hell, even our diets aren't logical. We should all be eating nutrition bars carefully concocted to provide us with the optimal calories and nutrients to keep us functioning (regardless of taste).
I had the enlightening experience of dating a social worker who explained how often the layman's "logical" and simplistic solutions to all kinds of domestic issues were either ineffective or could be downright detrimental. When you understand that, you can start to envision how the "obvious" solution to social ailment X would fail in practice (otherwise it would have been tried already).
Engineers tend to be technocrats (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineers often like to think of themselves as libertarians.
But I've met enough that when you even begin to scratch the surface, they tend to be very technocratic... believing there must be a better way to organize something if only *they* could be trusted to run something.
This is more and more true in places with a higher emphasis on academia.
Academics suffer from what I like to call systems thinking. Having spent enough time there, they almost always try and solve every problem by modelling and then playing with it numerically.
This results in the idea that we should trust in such models above and beyond people's choices. To use an engineers mentality, they tend to like centralized big computers instead of distributed systems :P Kinda odd isn't it.
There is nothing 'scientific' about it. Science can't tell you what values or policies you should follow, but they tend to like to frame it that way.
I personally credit this kind of systems thinking for the recent financial collapse. At no point in history has there been so much sophistication and modelling in the financial system. Yet of course people are still in the system for their own self-interest, their own biases, still gaming it, models were incorrect or imperfect. And of course who gets to be in charge and make decisions based on the models...
When Greenspan made his point about the 'market failing' it was a classic systems thinking mistake.
The banks have a vested interest to enhance share holder value, so they would be in the best position to regulate themselves... as their institution's purpose is to enhance share holder value... which means keeping the bank in good shape.
It's like saying car drivers have a natural interest to prevent accidents. Therefore, they should be allowed to regular themselves.
I won't get into saying whether we need more/better/less regulation. But I will say this. We as a society have decided we like to have stable banking. The government backs and insures banks. It then has a duty to regulate them. Just like your car insurance company regulates you by charging you more for more risk, denying you coverage if you're too risky...
I see the same thing all the time on so many policies.
When it comes to education policy or health policy, many think we can generate expert panels on all of these to deliver excellent healthcare and education.
Meanwhile, the centralization of power that comes with unions and medical associations and payment and politics and facing parents with different beliefs and facing people who are facing death or illness... basically anything human is something they choose to ignore.
Which is very common for technocrats... and hence engineers. Just like the Euro. These big systems designed by technocrats and engineers and scientists will eventually fail because they're ignorant for anything related to humanity.
It's like they try and solve a complex equation... but they ignore the biggest variable... humanity.
I'd like to point out option C (Score:5, Insightful)
It could be that Scott Adams is just a dickhead who's coasting along on the singular achievement of pointing out what everyone already knows, but doing it with a dog wearing glasses.
I am a Technocract (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I'd not say I lean libertarian at all. Corporations are currently the largest source of corruption and the largest threat to personal rights in the western world. Right now, there are a number of corporations with far more power over you than the government. So I am dismayed at the common libertarian diatribes that everything will be alright, if we just get rid of government. What fills the hole left by government?
I would say I lean much more towards European socialism. I don't believe in survival or the fittest or deep class structures. If inheritance and embezzlement are the two biggest sources of wealth in the country, then the country is in the wrong and needs to be repaired. Further, there are many times when something just does not belong in private hands. Corporations naturally are greedy and corrupting influences, and are nowhere near as efficient as the libertarian types like to think; government can be corrupted, but is not inherently anything negative.
My primary concern is that given my definition of Technocracy above, it has the potential to become all sorts of bad things. Which is why I think anyone who actually goes out to claim they are a Technocrat needs to ultimately follow a few rules:
1. The goal of society is to provide the greatest average good for its members.
2. Communication should always be free. Censorship is always wrong.
3. Nothing should be restricted on emotional or religious basis.
If even half of politicians followed those three rules, we'd be living in a far better world today. It is time we start forcing them to do so.
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I resemble this remark, except I replace #3 with informed on a rational religious basis, ie, I'm a Chestertonian Distributist with a hint of Marxist (in that I believe that capitalism should have a starting line of minimum private property allowed, not necessarily dictate outcomes, but should have a maximum amount of private property allowed equal to the assets of the nation - (minimum private property allowed * population-1), and I believe that should be so because of the Christian Concept of Human Dignity
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is Silicon Valley the heart of engineering?? Maybe if you're an electrical or computer engineer. Engineering has been around a lot longer than Silicon Valley or the 1980s. Why not also pretend San Francisco is the heart of engineering?
Libertarians are more likely to be self-starters and doers, which is more consistent with the engineering mentality.
Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be welfare-staters, because their science funding and grantsmanship culture is ever more dependent on the state.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be welfare-staters, because their science funding and grantsmanship culture is ever more dependent on the state.
This doesn't follow at all. You might as well say prison inmates will always vote for big government, for the same reason.
In my own experience, political thought in all professions runs the gamut, depending more upon an individual's upbringing, values, and experience than anything else. The idea that engineers or scientists went into a certain field because of some hard-wired biological characteristic that also controls their emotions, morals, and values just sounds like a modern-day spin on phrenology to me.
But since I might as well use this comment to throw out an inflammatory opinion of my own, scientists are more likely to be left-leaning because they're intelligent.
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They do tend to vote for big government. They're statistically more likely to be Democrat. That's why the dems favor giving ex-cons voting rights while reps typically oppose it.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Prison inmates are held agains their will and demonstrably do not come out being welfare-statst.
Say instead that anyone in the military will obviously be welfare-statist, then, because all of the military's funding also comes from the government.
My point is that I highly doubt that anyone who's had to write a grant has done so while thinking, "glory, glory to the blessed state, praise that your scraps may fall unto my unworthy plate." If they could get funded another way without compromising the integrity of their research, they would.
Also, the claim that government funding for scientific research evidence of a "welfare state" is facile. Just for starters, who would you rather have split the atom first? Nazi Germany? There are valid purposes for government, and just as military defense is one of them, so is scientific research with the aim of the betterment of society. Being in favor of science in no way predisposes you to socialism.
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who would you rather have split the atom first? Nazi Germany?
I would have preferred Bell Labs to patent the first nuclear weapon. Then we'd have one company for all countries to 'license' their nuclear weapons from.
What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Informative)
Scientists, on the other hand, are more likely to be welfare-staters, because their science funding and grantsmanship culture is ever more dependent on the state.
So many things wrong with this idea.
1.) Academic findings benefit all humanity, since they are publicly available. (Read that a couple times.)
2.) I would venture that most scientists are employed outside of academia. (I.E. they're producers..) (Unless you're defining a scientist as someone in a science field that never applies science. That's a rather arbitrary distinction since all applied subjects rely on theoretical constructs, and rife for counter examples.)
3.) There's a fundamental question that your statement begs at. That fundamental question threatens the nature of our civilization. 'Pure' science subjects (theoretical physics, theoretical chemistry, pure math, and so on) are probably best funded by a government. Ideally, they would be conducted in a vacuum outside of the economy (maybe then all results would be trustable). But, short of that, broad reaching government funding probably works best. Even number theory has its applications, and I doubt any developments would be made in number theory without government funding.
4.) Contrast professor pay with industry pay sometime. Be careful to include years of experience, as professor positions require constant research into new areas. A tenured professor probably has dozens of published articles and roughly a decade worth of work experience. In short, they're experts at the top of their fields. In industry, they would be paid at the top end.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think engineers know how hard it is to build any complicated system. Whether it's code, circuit, or machine. I think they know how foolish it would be to try to centrally plan a country of 300 million people.
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Like Occupy Wall St. supporters, right?
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some may consider that a small nitpick, but I personally find it to be an important one. When I engage people in discussions about free market principles, I make sure to let people know that I am just as disgusted with our corporately-owned government as the next guy.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
And then the unicorns and fairies come in and make the world a perfect place?
I'm afraid I simply don't believe that any more than I believe that tax cuts for the rich makes all of our lives better. All it does is give tax cuts to the rich.
Libertarians have a fantasy model of how economics works, which has absolutely no bearing on reality. The free market doesn't solve problems, human nature means it basically devolves to brute force. There is no spoon.
Not suggesting Communism works either ... but having two polar opposite views doesn't make either of them right. The Libertarian Utopia is a falsehood, just like the Communist Utopia.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I assert that as it's defined today Libertarianism is a complete farce, and simply doesn't take modern realities into account.
From wiki:
If funding the government was voluntary, nobody would do it. But, then pretty much every Libertarian goes on to more or less equate having laws in a society is a repressive form of violence. Help, help, I'm being repressed ... I'm not allowed to speed, zomg, my rights are being taken away.
I've read the books, and for a while I drank the kool-aid ... scrapping all forms of government regulation and expecting the unicorns and fairies of the free market to come up with optimal solutions is utter horseshit.
As most people describe it, Libertarianism is anarchism with an expectation that people will cooperate because it serves their "enlightened self interest" ... in reality, it will just devolve to the rule of might, and pretty much the assumption that everyone else should be left to fend for themselves as long as there's a minimal government around to keep them from taking your stuff.
It works out well for the privileged, and those in power ... the rest can pretty much go fuck themselves.
But, you'll say something lame like "people would still be free to help out others, they'd just be relieved of the burden of being forced (at gun point from the state violence that enforces the rules) to contribute to society overall; they'd do it if they wanted". Yeah, right.
I lost faith in the notion that the free-market "solves" anything other than profit a long time ago. It doesn't educate people, it doesn't offer to lift them up, and it sure as hell doesn't give them a better lot in life ... it just opens you up for a different kind of serfdom. One in which your employer is free to cut your wages, and you're free to go elsewhere.
It's a system of government designed to enforce property rights for some people, while leaving the rest to figure out how to get property and the other essentials of life on their own.
A quote from Ebenezer Scrooge pretty much sums it up ...
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Familiar with both, don't put faith in either. One claims it has a better way of describing what is happening than the other, they're both ideologies, but not facts.
Nice false dichotomy there, though. You're giving me two options of your own choice (both of which support your position), and asserting that either I must believe in one wrong one or another. My point is that I don't.
I believe the government are idiots, that the system is corrupt, and most things which claim to describe how it all works is, by definition, woefully incomplete and likely to be filled with its own biases about how it all works. In some cases, those can be very dangerous as people blindly believe their system is infallible. You know, beliefs like the notion that everyone is acting with full and complete information, that people aren't gaming the system, that an unregulated economy will end up with results any different than melamine in baby formula [scientificamerican.com].
If my choice comes down to this [wikipedia.org]:
then my answer is "neither". As a matter of fact, I'll go one step further and say that if the choice is free banking [wikipedia.org] or anarcho capitalism [wikipedia.org], well, that's what got us into the recent financial mess, and that neither works. I think the whole thing is flawed.
And, really, all you're saying is that by disagreeing with Ron Paul I'm disagreeing with the principles of Libertarian economics ... which I've already quite explicitly said. I think in general economists know far less than they're willing to admit. They just think they've wrapped it up in some grand unifying theory that appeals to them, and then they wrap themselves up in it like it's religion. And then it's all dogma from there.
Hell, Alan Greenspan used to suggest that people should borrow all of the equity they have in their home, because it was basically free money. That alone forces me to conclude he was an advocate of something which didn't work. Hell, he eventually even admitted that "something" was wrong about his view of economics, he's just not sure of what.
I'm simply no longer willing to believe the people who claim to know how to run the economy ... they're clearly unqualified. And, for the record, I don't claim to have a better solution ... but I can tell the ones that are failing horribly.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Many libertarians believe individuals retain their rights when they join groups
Weasel words alert. Nobody is claiming you should loose your individual rights when you join a corporation, its just that you shouldn't gain additional rights by virtue of controlling an organisation.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is claiming you should loose your individual rights when you join a corporation, its just that you shouldn't gain additional rights by virtue of controlling an organisation.
He's talking about responsibility, not gaining extra rights.
People who go to work for a corporation shouldn't become immune to the bad acts they commit there. In theory they do retain some responsibility, but in practice they really don't.
Show me the Wall Street tycoons who went to prison for the 2008 crash or the people at Sony who went to jail for their little rootkit adventure. Maybe the corporation pays some big fine, but the individuals usually get off scot-free.
So they have incentive to misbehave.
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Here is what currently happens in the US. By paying a small fee a corporation and all of its owners or shareholders are granted infinite liability insurance on their personal assets. That is at the crux of the problem with corporations as designed now.That is how many people can get rich while bankrupting a company. Imagine this. You start a company get business loans (usually with government backing) transfer that money to yourself in personal income. You can keep racking up debt while transferring wealth
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
And a lot of that tape prevents fraud, tax cheats, skirting labor laws, and your screwy idea from polluting the environment, excluding people by race color creed and national origin (and perhaps a few more characteristics, depending on juridiction).
Fie on the weasel words of "red tape" as an impediment to business. If you wanna be a scofflaw, head to the third world, where it's wild and wooly and quite profitable-- but with vasts amount of bribery, decay, pollution, and exclusion.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Informative)
And a lot of that tape prevents fraud, tax cheats, skirting labor laws, and your screwy idea from polluting the environment
You realize that you are replying to a strand which specifically mentioned the removal of limited liability, right?
I suspect that you didnt even consider it a possibility that the real problem with corporations is that their members are not generally treated on a legal level as individuals responsible for their corporate actions.
...excluding people by race color creed and national origin (and perhaps a few more characteristics, depending on juridiction).
Ah yes, the ol' legislate morality bullshit. If in one breath we complain about the dangers of corporate influences on the centralized government and thus the people, then how is it OK that in another we champion special-interest influences on the centralized government and thus the people?
The problem with both corporations and government is the centralization of the very things that shouldnt be centralized. We have corporate welfare on the grandest scale ever, while the government strips us of our rights at the fastest pace ever. You lost your 4th amendment rights just shy of a decade ago, and last month you just lost your 6th amendment rights.
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This is an important point. Implementing any single once of these "libertarian ideas" on its own may result in an even worse situation than what we get using the current patchwork. Changing everything at once would be very difficult and likely lead to a period of chaos. Changing things gradually means they never get done. So what can be done?
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Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Since corporations only exist due to special protections granted to them by the government, many (most?) libertarians (myself included) do not consider them to be actors in, nor an accurate representation of, a true free market.
I don't think it's quite that simple. In an unhampered free market it is possible that people will voluntarily choose to organize themselves into groups that function according to similar rules as those that what we now call "corporations" do now. There will be no limited liability (with regard to lawsuits; limited liability with regard to debts can still exist as part of the loan contract, so conservatives' fears that without limited liability there will be no business at all are quite unfounded), so people will be punished for fraud and environmental damage more, and things will be better in that regard, but the format of the large business as a whole could still exist. And there's nothing wrong with that - it's never as simple as "rich people are evil"; look at the so-called "robber baron" era of the 19th century - some rich people got their way through powerful friends and corruption and government-assisted cartelization, while others played fairly on the market and used their fortunes to set up institutions that continue to serve the public good even now (see: Nobel prizes, American non-profit universities, etc). It's exactly the same way even now.
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Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait wait wait - we're talking about a libertarian economy here, right? By what mechanism will this "punishment" be allocated? Will that be the sole responsibility of the government?
No, you don't need a government to punish someone who harms you. You have the right to do that yourself. Practically speaking, most would choose to establish their claim through arbitration before turning to direct action, and would probably hire out the actual enforcement rather than doing it themselves, but so long as you're truly in the right, and willing to accept the full responsibility for your actions, there is nothing wrong with seeking restitution and even retribution on your own. The courts don't grant you the right to respond; they just help to publicly establish your grievance and spread out the responsibility for the decision.
Most cases would probably be resolved peaceably. For one thing, many disputes are already handled via private arbitration, as it's more cost-effective than turning to the government courts, so the system has plenty of precedent. Unless they're showing plain partiality to your opponent, bypassing or ignoring the arbiters is a great way to ensure that no one will feel safe doing business with you, even if there was no further enforcement. However, the right to pursue restitution and retribution privately remains should someone actually choose to flaunt the ruling.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Interesting)
Philosophy is of little importance when the policies libertarians support would have the opposite effect. Libertarians are always pushing for smaller government and fewer regulations, which would have the effect of making large, wealthy businesses even more powerful.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Interesting)
So in a truly free market, the one makes the rules who is able to hire the most and the evilst thugs?
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You'd then go to jail for assault and/or murder. At a minimum, you would be fined for making false claims. Of course, the free market would let you sell that food, you'd just have to face the consequences for doing so. The not-free market also lets you sell that food, the difference is that instead of those charges, you'd just get slapped with a small fine for "adulteration of a foodstuff". Murder (at least attempted murder) better describes the activity, but the non-free market doesn't seem to care much for that term.
Not all Libertarians (in fact, I'd say very few) are opposed to the idea of the government still existing to enforce a very basic set of laws.
Fantastic. I'm really happy with the idea of spending much of my life litigating a bunch of profit loving morons that are planning on getting away with as much as is humanly possible. You seem to have more faith in the legal system than I do.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but how do you enforce the lack of fraud? Who defines fraud? Who polices it? Prosecutes it? Carries out the sentence? Verifies that the sentence is being carried out? Who informs others that said sentence has been carried out correctly?
And now you're right back in big government mode. And if you say free market, I've got some nice land to sell you in Somalia.
Libertarianism is to reality as Communism is to reality.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that's because a number of the views that are qualified as libertarian here are indeed nothing but anarcho-capitalism. They're not even true anarchy, they actually manage to be worse than that.
The main problem with those views is that they start with the premise that government is bad by definition. It isn't - it's a tool we invented to organize our social tendencies. As a result, libertarians who claim that the government is bad by definition fall into the trap that there is never a level where there is too little government. You could always cut back more. Furthermore, they vastly underestimate how much even the basic services they are ok with would cost: DoD, DoJ and State Department.
I'd love to get on board the Libertarian bandwagon - in theory, it should be the ideal place for me: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand and her followers have managed to corrupt that term to a degree that it has nothing to do with its classical definition. The reason I bring up Somalia is because it is one of the few places that truly has a weak central government. Even Afghanistan has a stronger central government than they do.
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September 2008 proved to me that anarcho-Captialism not only doesn't work, but that when you remove all effective regulation from any given market people go ape-shit crazy.
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I think there's some confusion between conservative, dogmatic, libertarian, and objectivist. And others...
Because conservatism (of the hysterical kind) is so dominant, anything non-conservative is deemed libertarian, even when it is something else.
Right & Left Libertarians (Score:3)
While it's currently fashionable for Neo-cons to call themselves libertarians, the philosophy of Libertarianism actually covers everything from far-left anarchists to far-right objectivists.
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Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama is right of center
Only if center is the Communist party.
By most of the worlds standards Obama is indeed right of centre, there are few if any American politicians who aren't. Ask anyone with a basic knowledge of Politics, from Europe, South America or Asia, hell even Canada and they'll give you the same answer. A lot of us also think your medical system is a complete disgrace.
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A lot of us also think your medical system is a complete disgrace.
Feel free not to use any of the advances we develop, on principle.
Re:Libertarians? (Score:5, Insightful)
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... said the man who has no clue what the communist ideology is.
Barack Obama is as communist as Rush Limbaugh is a faithful and honest christian.
Re:Aspergers Cases who Lack Empathy (Score:5, Insightful)
No. We think they should have applied themselves while in school and gotten themselves a half decent trade or profession. Also we think that they would do well to escape from the general anti-intellectual attitude in the US especially when it comes to math.
Not understanding numbers is as harmful as not being able to read.
and another thing (Score:3)
they also have difficulty seeing when someone should be openly mocked for painting broad stereotypes.
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Re:China too.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My career does not define me and my views (Score:5, Interesting)
Over the years of arguments, people have tried to pigeon hole and label me a Conservative, a Liberal, an NDP supporter, a Libertarian, a Socialist, a Communist, and pretty much every other label you can think of.
Anyone who tries to simplify my stance with a buzzword is trying to appease their own desire to label me so they can dismiss my arguments out of hand as "he's just a XXX". Labeling stances and assuming that support of a party means blind support of their theoretical ideologies is an insult to any citizen who actually THINKS about social issues and politics.
The idea of taking that a step further and assuming that my career choice pre-labels me as having some particular viewpoint is so far out to lunch it's unreal.
What the hell was the article writer smoking? I want some!
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Adams [wikipedia.org] is closer to the Pointy Haired Boss than he ever was to Dilbert, or Wally. Perhaps he's sympathetic to the engineering perspective, but his bachelors was in economics, and he has a MBA.
Re:I'm wired as an engineer... (Score:5, Funny)
An economic socialist and a social conservative? So you'll take all our money and refuse to let us have porn or drugs? Ugh.
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It's not a completely absurd concept. You'll have variation in any group, but it's not unreasonable to wonder if people in profession X tend to have a set of views described as Y. You'll never have 100% correlation, but if research suggests that, say, dog catchers tend to be pro-life, then it's silly to just ignore it. It doesn't mean that any given dog catcher has to hold that view, but when something trends like that there's usually a reason.